


What Dreams May Come

by cacophonyGilded



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mentions of suicidal tendencies, Sexual Content, alt title: i finally managed to write gobblepot with actual dialogue what a concept, background nygmakins, blink-and-you'll miss it references to jim/lee jim/barbara jim/valerie and jim/sofia, loose christian ideology, q-slur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 13:16:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14694986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cacophonyGilded/pseuds/cacophonyGilded
Summary: Jim's encounter with Jeremiah's bomb helps him see Oswald Cobblepot in a new light.---When Jim Gordon awakens, it is like this: someone is sitting on his hips.





	What Dreams May Come

**Author's Note:**

> title quote comes from hamlet's "to be or not to be" monologue (act 3 scene 1 line 67). the full line is "for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause," which i find... startlingly relevant to my initial idea for this fic. 
> 
> basically, au where jim didn't get off so easily (obvious innuendo aside) when he encountered jeremiah's bomb at the end of 4x20. written before the events of 4x21, so not completely canon-compliant outside of the obvious changes, although it was edited with 4x21 in mind.

When Jim Gordon dies, it goes like this: he is in a small room with a pulsing bomb, the faintest tendrils of terror beginning to twine themselves, boa-like, around his thoughts despite his best efforts to stave them off, to move, to  _ think, _ damn it. He grasps blindly for the release he knows must exist, and--yes!--seconds before he’s blown to kingdom come, a button yields under his hand, a door opens and he goes to it, through it and maybe to safety, but no: as soon as he’s breached the doorway, the inevitable happens and his time runs out in a maelstrom of fire and shrapnel. For a split second, Jim feels himself thrown, crushed, and burned simultaneously, a momentary torture on a scale so great he can hardly comprehend it. Mercifully, he loses consciousness quickly after that.

 

When Jim Gordon awakens, it is like this: someone is sitting on his hips.

 

Straddling them, really; before he can bring himself to open his eyes, to inspect the damages, to throw himself back into the grueling fray; before his senses have returned to the body that surely should be mangled by now, mangled beyond both repair and recognition (if it exists as anything more than ashes and dust at all), he can feel that weight, legs braced on either side of him, a hand lazily stroking  _ (petting?) _ his chest.

Jim is lying down. Of that he’s certain. The surface he’s on--that’s harder to pinpoint, but it’s definitely a bed, and a nicer one than he’s slept in since Barbara to boot.  _ Whose bed? _ Sensation returns to him piece by piece, like putting together a puzzle and finally being able to see the picture take shape; he’s aware, now, of the clouds of pillows he’s propped up on, the silky texture of the sheets at his back. He’s clothed, and that comes as a relief. He blinks a few times, blearily, and when sight returns to him, things around him come only as vague outlines, shapes, but the figure on his chest, pale and dark in equal measure, registers as etherically pretty even so.

Maybe, he thinks crazily, it’s an angel.

Last to return to him is his hearing--at first there’s nothing, then a ringing, and finally, a voice. That voice… at first, it only registers as a comfort, as a steady thrum of noise on the outskirts of his consciousness. His brain begins to shift back into focus, though, and then--Jim knows, suddenly, that he has heard this voice before. When he recognizes it, Jim realizes that it’s been talking to him, cooing and calling to him, for quite some time.

“--James? Stay with me, old friend. You’re all right now.”

The recognition he feels sends everything else into a final, dizzying clarity. Now Jim recognizes the figure in his lap for what it is--the soft voice becoming less soothing, the vague outline of a face becoming sharp, familiar lines that Jim cringes at having called pretty--and  _ well.  _

It’s no angel.

Oswald Cobblepot is sitting seductively on his dick.

Okay, well, no: not  _ on  _ his dick, exactly. There’s the fabric of their clothes between them still, not to mention that, as he was very recently asleep (and not to mention very recently dead), he’s not exactly in top form, sexually speaking.

Still. It’s pretty damn close for comfort.

Blearily, Jim tries to push himself into a sitting position.

“Oswald?”

The Penguin’s eyes brighten, but the hand on his chest applies pressure, forcing him back down onto the bed.

“Now, Jim, don’t be too hasty. I imagine spontaneous combustion takes a lot out of a person.”

His voice sounds just like it always does--there’s no mistaking it, not even in this haze of death Jim finds himself fighting through, so intrinsically Oswald as it is--but something about it has taken on an unfortunate, lilting quality. No, that’s not quite right--

Jim shudders, barely. Oswald sounds _ seductive. _

A smug smile slides onto Penguin’s face as he misinterprets the movement and leans down so close that his lips just barely brush Jim’s ear. 

“Am I already having such an effect on you?”

Jim’s immediate instinct is to tell him that there’s no response but disgust, that he’s never felt anything akin to…  _ that _ for him. The thing is, though, that he doesn’t know where he is, that he’s otherwise completely alone, that he doesn’t want to encourage the only person here to leave him completely isolated (and if this version of Oswald is nearly as touchy as the one he knows, Jim’s sure he’ll be left for dead in an instant). Plus… it wouldn’t be completely true.

Considering it for the first time in his life, Jim realizes that he has, in flashes, been attracted to Oswald Cobblepot. It’s a blow, this realization, and starts him off on a journey through memories Jim highly prefers when they’re buried--but the memories are there nonetheless. These tiny soundbites of attraction have always been horrible and inconvenient, twisting his guts and leaving him confused and sick, but he can’t deny that Oswald has, in the past, succeeded in having an  _ effect _ on him. 

He blames it on the fact that he’d so clearly once had a similar, stronger effect on Oswald--that had weaseled its way into his head, surely, had planted some idea….

That’s probably all it is. Jim sighs, willing his swirling, diving thoughts to disperse like a pack of gulls disturbed by a fright on the water, and braces his hand on Oswald’s arm, grabbing and holding on too tight, needing both an anchor and an excuse not to think in equal measure. As soon as he makes contact with Oswald, though, he knows it’s a mistake--finds with horrible clarity how much he  _ needs _ it, how  _ comforting _ that contact is. Contact--the thought of it brings another to his head, trains his mind directly down, down to his groin, down to the pressure of Oswald’s bony ass digging into his hip.

“What the hell is this,” Jim growls politely. A lone gull of his panic has swept back to him, and he needs a distraction badly, any excuse to wave it away. 

The growl comes out completely flat and cracked with disuse, as if he hasn’t had cause to speak in a considerably long time. Oswald doesn’t react to the oddity, doesn’t comment, but simply shifts so that he’s pressed closer to Jim, leaning into him in a way that might be intended to offer comfort. It’s unclear whether Oswald is untalented at giving it (giving anything when he gets nothing in return), or if it’s just that Jim is untalented at receiving it, but either way, the motion definitely has the opposite effect; if he weren’t wary of his discomfort being mistaken for lust, the proximity might make Jim inclined to shudder again.

“Well, James, you’re the detective. Why don’t you tell me?”

As he asks, Oswald reaches up and brushes a strand of hair off Jim’s forehead, a gesture that might be tender coming from anyone else. Skin tingling with hyperawareness of the touch (of the  _ contact), _ Jim forces himself to loosen and drop his grip on Oswald’s arm, mourning what he loses by doing so as soon as he’s done it, but telling himself firmly that it’s for the best. No matter what this is, putting his trust too far into Oswald Cobblepot has never ended well for him before.

Hasn’t it? The reverse is certainly true, so Jim prefers to believe that the forward direction is equally as straightforward. Oswald would be much better off if he never trusted Jim, but….

No. Going down that line of thinking will bring Jim far too close to a moral revelation or some kind of soul crushing guilt, and he has always preferred to eschew self awareness for blissful ignorance. It’s one of the few matters on which he refuses to compromise.

“Well,” Jim hears his voice crack again and clears his throat, uncomfortable. “I was at the precinct. Jerome’s followers were breaking in, so I left to warn Jeremiah and Bruce, and then--and then Jeremiah had the whole place rigged--he was as crazy as his brother… there was a bomb. It blew up. I… died.” Jim nods, accepting his fate. It’s easier than he wants to admit; some dark voice in his head whispers that he’d been seeking that conclusion to his story all along. “That’s it, huh? This is…” he hesitates, looking around at the space but feeling his mind register nothing of what he sees, then darting his eyes back to Oswald, currently regarding him with a strange mixture of fondness and smugness in his eyes. Finally, Jim swallows. “Hell?”

Oswald’s hand stops frozen where it was rubbing lazy circles on Jim’s chest. His face freezes, too, for a second, an excruciatingly eternal moment before Oswald can regain his usual composure and plaster a smile back on his face (and why, Jim wonders, is he so relieved when he isn’t being reminded that Oswald is a real person whose real feelings can be hurt?).

“You place yourself in hell because of my presence here? You wound me, old friend.” 

Before Jim can argue the point or open his soul about his fears that if he is indeed in hell, then he knows that it’s because he himself is a murderer, a dirtbag, and a corrupt policeman rolled into one, Oswald brushes the offense away. 

“But yes and no, to your question. This,” he looks around at the vast something, not empty or void, but impossible to register, dark but not to the point of obscuring vision, light, but only seeming to emanate from some singular source that Jim can tell is nearby but cannot place within his field of vision. “Is the afterlife. It could be hell if you make it that but,” Oswald shrugs. “I’m just here to give you a nice time.”

Jim thinks for half a second to ask Oswald what he means but, as if reading his mind, Oswald grinds down on his hips demonstratively. 

_ Oh. _

“You-- _ what?" _

Oswald’s eyes drop, half lidded, to Jim’s shirt, and he starts to undo it with his clever fingers, always so graceful and sure even as his steps fall faltering and clumsy _ \--what?-- _ and Jim jerks back, both from the intrusive, inexplicable thought and from the hands making short work of his buttons.

It’s not the first time he’s been overwhelmed by Oswald Cobblepot, but he is significantly more likely to get a boner now than he usually is in comparable situations. Most of them.

“No. What the hell, Oswald--what are you even doing here?” Something occurs to him. “Are you dead?”

Movement stopping as soon as Jim proves averse to it, Oswald blinks, once, twice, and then bursts out laughing. 

“Oh, you poor thing. You really don’t have a clue, do you?”

“Don’t be obtuse,” Jim growls.  _ “I’m  _ dead. Do you not think I deserve some fucking answers?”

Oswald seems to consider it for a second, and then gives in, brushing Jim’s hair away from his face again with a sigh. 

“No, I’m not dead. You know me better than that, don’t you? As hellish as it can be sometimes, I for one  _ like _ being alive. Not like you,” Oswald’s smile turns sad, regretful as he studies Jim’s face “always going out on your suicide missions, doing your damnedest to be Gotham city’s prettiest corpse.”

“If you aren’t dead, and I am, then--”

“Shhh. You want answers, don’t you? Let me take care of you, Jim.” Oswald’s face takes on a strange quality that Jim can’t read. “You  _ do _ know I’ll always take care of you, right?”

Jim swallows thickly. He doesn’t know how to respond.

Mercifully, Oswald continues without waiting for an answer. “I’m not dead. But coming so close, so many times… who knows? Maybe I’m here to repay my debts to the Grim Reaper for a while.”

“By trying to seduce me and then abandoning me in hell to go on with your life?”

“By keeping you occupied until you inevitably make your heroic comeback and cheat your untimely death. Come now, Jim, you don’t have to be so insistent you’re in hell.” Oswald splays his hands on Jim’s chest, radiating heat that Jim can’t pin down as blessed or hellish. “Don’t you ever,” oh, and Jim’s shirt is still halfway undone, his tie now being pulled off with nearly obscene reverence, and he’s being drawn in, and against himself and his will and everything he stands for, Jim leans forward, intrigued. “Let yourself enjoy the hedonistic pleasures the rest of us so often partake in?”

“No,” Jim breaths, and Oswald gets a full halfway through his amused response (“Okay, now that--”) before Jim gives in to the inevitable and brings the Penguin down forcefully into a burning, sloppy kiss.

It takes him as a surprise, his green eyes flashing once (has he always known how strikingly  _ green _ Oswald’s eyes are? is that color even reflective of real life, or are things exaggerated here, for pleasure or a mockery of it?) before closing, before Oswald softens into the kiss and repositions his legs and arms (sharp as knives, every edgepiece and corner that digs into Jim) to accommodate it.

Jim kisses hard, wasting no time on teasing or learning the simple feeling and pleasure of the way his mouth fits against Oswald’s. He doesn’t need to--disturbingly, the whole scene feels very familiar, as if he and Oswald are longtime lovers, comfortable with the press of their bodies against one another and the basic taste of each others’ mouths. Another thing to compartmentalize and forget, then. Jim is racking up so many of those that he’ll run out of storage soon if he isn’t careful.

He maintains the kiss for as long as he can, because so long as he is moving, breathing in Oswald like doing so will bring him back to life, he doesn’t have to consider what he’s doing, or with whom, or what he’ll have to do next. In the end, it’s Oswald who pulls away first. As the kiss fades, Jim is once again aware of that implacable light, that soft glow, and wastes a few seconds contemplating it, nearly asking after it--but is quickly distracted by the sight of Oswald fighting a losing battle to maintain his composure, face red and hair disheveled. It’s an image that has flown fast and loose through his head in the least composed moments of his indulgence, and what’s light in the face of the beautiful shade that eclipses it? 

Averse to talking, Jim tries to pull Oswald down into another kiss as messy as their history. This time, Oswald sees it coming, and denies him.

“Patience, James,” he chides, crossing his arms loosely over Jim’s chest and resting his chin on them lazily. His eyes are still hooded, lips swollen, and Jim realizes with a jolt that he has never felt anything quite like this, what he is feeling just  _ looking _ at Oswald in this moment.

Then again, of course, he has never been dead, either.

“Why,” Jim asks, wincing as he hears in his own voice how desperate, how wanting he sounds. “Why wait? You’ve wanted this for a long time, haven’t you,  _ Penguin?” _

Even through the fog of his panic, Jim understands that this line is a desperate bid to put distance between them. The physical aspect of all of this, the  _ movement _ he can deal with--real emotions are pushing things too far, asking him to search and reflect on his own soul too deeply. Pushing Oswald away is his last-ditch effort to end this before it begins, his hermit-shell defense against self awareness, but even he can see how weak his defenses are, how clearly his intent is offset by his body’s response: this last sentence is dropped into a low growl, punctuated by a possessive arm draped over Oswald’s back. Oswald stiffens, startled, his eyes going from hooded to wide and searching Jim’s face for answers. With a certain degree of satisfaction, Jim thinks that it serves him right, to be left wondering--for all his equivocation over Jim’s questions, he certainly deserves it.

The obvious confusion lasts for only a second before Oswald plays it off, always the survivor, chuckling and resting his chin back on his arms. 

“Sudden change of heart? I didn’t think you’d ever address that…  _ embarrasing  _ little misstep on my part, detective.”

Jim opens his mouth to protest, to explain, but before he can get a single word out, Oswald is pushing himself up and pulling Jim’s mouth to his own by virtue of one hand fisted in his shirt and the other finding the back of Jim’s neck, the kiss soft and sweet and not at all what Jim needs, Jim, who is aching with frustration and want and confusion at what the hell he’s doing, anyway. Does he actually want this? Has he wanted this before, and suppressed it, or is this happening simply because Oswald is here, because he woke up with legs around his waist and weight on his hips and needed something base and familiar, no matter who supplied it? Oswald’s lips graze his, meet him gently, and this, Jim realizes with a jolt, is what  _ Oswald  _ wants--not a quick, hard distraction but some semblance of a legitimate romance. Jim wants to forget himself and get lost in the ecstasy, but Oswald just wants  _ him. _

It’s too much and not enough. Out of his depth, Jim is the first one to pull away this time, catching half a glance of disappointment on Oswald’s face before he composes himself yet again. Part of Jim wishes Oswald would quit doing that, that he would quit  _ making  _ Oswald resort to that--putting up a mask of amusement and composure to hide any suggestion of real feeling whatsoever, terrified to have it interpreted as weakness. That he dons these walls so effortlessly around Jim… that must say something, right?

He hasn’t ever given this much thought to the Penguin’s feelings before. It’s a deep rabbit hole to go down; if he starts thinking about all the ways he has hurt Oswald Cobblepot, he might never extract himself from the deep well of guilt.

“Thank you for indulging me, Jim. I know it must have been… repulsive, for you.”

Jim can’t tell if Oswald is fishing for guilt, or if he just genuinely thinks so little of himself. His response is the same either way: “No. I’ve never… you don’t repulse me.”

Oswald looks at him coolly, lips suddenly pulled back in a sneer. 

“No? Not my utter lack of a moral code? Not my ugly, damaged leg? Not my  _ big, queer crush on you?”  _ Oswald seems to take a certain unhappy glee from counting the reasons he thinks Jim should hate him, and the last is said with horrible derision, emphasized by a perversion of their previous kisses, which he pulls Jim into forcefully and finishes abruptly. Jim pushes him away, alarmed, and Oswald falls back looking vindicated. Satisfied. “There are men in Gotham who have shot me for less, you know,” Oswald finishes with a bitter snarl, words acidic as he hurls them at Jim in a bid to protect himself as Jim had. Space, distance--everything hinges on how Jim responds now, and a part of Oswald, even in this dreamscape, clearly wants Jim to reject him, because it would be easier, so much easier.

Mortifyingly, Jim doesn’t have to even consider how he responds, because thoughts of Oswald shot fill his head--Oswald dying in a gang war, Oswald succumbing to various and increasingly alarming injuries, Oswald sinking in the harbor, motionless, the fate he had been condemned to all those years ago and postponed, but never truly escaped--and consume him with a sudden, righteous anger. Without even stopping to consider it, he pulls Oswald down into a kiss again, a real kiss this time, softer this time than his first and the one the Penguin had forced, though still tinged with a possessive anger (and when had he become so possessive of Oswald, anyway?), the passionate notion that he is  _ never _ going to let anyone hurt Oswald again, his actions be damned, passing through his head wildly.

Unfortunate for Oswald that the realization comes after Jim is already too dead to do anything about it, but hey. Sentiment has to count for something.

Jim breaks the kiss, beginning to pull back from Oswald but leaning in one more time as an afterthought, leaving a kiss as gentle as the ones the Penguin led with on his lips, hardly more than a brush. When Jim finally lies back, panting, against the pillow, Oswald makes no pretense of hiding the way his breath comes in gasps or the flush that paints itself over his face. It’s gratifying, and Jim can’t help but smile at him, lifting his hand to that flush and leaving it there, a point of contact among many points of contact.

It’s nice.

“And to think,” Oswald whispers, “all it took was a bomb the size of a city block to make Jim Gordon love me. If I had known the afterlife would be this satisfying, I would have died a long time ago.”

Jim feels a fond laugh escape him and nearly pauses to wonder who he’s becoming. “Now I know you aren’t Oswald. He’d hang on to his last breath.”

Oswald runs his tongue over his teeth, considering. “Full disclosure, Jim? I’m not.”

“Not,” Jim repeats.

“Not Oswald.” He sighs and rolls his body off of Jim’s, lying down beside him as if exhausted. The brushing of their arms is the lone point of contact they maintain, and Jim is aware of it, electrically. Staring straight at the vast whatever that makes up the space above them (if Jim looks, he might be able to make out stars and jewels and swirling colors he’s never seen, in dimensions he won’t be able to comprehend, but he doesn’t; all Jim is aware of is Oswald and, more distantly, that strange, radiating light he still can’t place), Oswald grimaces. “Well, I am. I’m  _ an _ Oswald. Not  _ your _ Oswald.”

Jim doesn’t get it. He looks blankly at Oswald (is it Oswald?), demanding answers with his furrowed brow.

“Look, I didn’t want to--hm. We all brush with death, James. Us more than most,” still looking straight up, a smile passes over his lips “but in the end, everyone. Some of us are less lucky than others.”

“You said you weren’t dead.”

“Oswald Cobblepot is not dead, no.”

“But you?”

He sighs. “Would it make you feel better if I said I was?”

“If it meant you weren’t going to wake up and leave me alone? Yes.”

Something changes in Oswald then, his smile turning miserable, his gaze finally fixing itself back on Jim’s face. Clutching Jim’s arm hard above the elbow and leaning up on his own, Oswald shakes his head. “I will  _ never  _ leave you alone, Jim.”

His voice has such an edge of raw truth that Jim shakes with it, overwhelmed. He pulls Oswald to him then, not sure which of them he’s comforting, but crushing their bodies together and burying his face in Oswald’s hair all the same. 

After a moment, Oswald pulls his arms around Jim, too, and they lay there, taking hardwon comfort from each other, for an imperceptible stretch of time. The concept has always eluded and even vexed Jim before, but when confronted with this easy coexistence, this mutual understanding between them that doesn’t demand words to fill the spaces left by incompatibility, Jim thinks he might start to understand the appeal of eternity.

It’s Oswald who breaks the silence. 

“You know what, forget what I said. I don’t have to be the real Oswald, or an offshoot, or anything--I could be a hallucination, the product of your dying brain, if you’d prefer. Whatever it takes to stay with you.”

A hallucination--Jim’s mind jumps back quickly to his…  _ enlightening _ experience courtesy of Jervis Tetch, guided by Barbara Kean in a short skirt that some subset of his waning mind had stuffed her in. Taking in Oswald, wearing what he now perceives to be a variation on his usual suit, dazzlingly red (and how had he missed that before?), Jim feels a pang of fear--could he be? Even he isn’t clueless enough to not understand why he’d dreamt Barbara (but--oh, he had dreamt Oswald too, then, hadn’t he? Guilt dripped out of the whole affair, and maybe that in itself was a sign of what was to come-- _ never leave your unit behind), _ his wayward love. Jim doesn’t have the tools to deal with emotions, and so they linger--in love with Barbara while he romanced Lee, in love with Lee when he pursued Valerie, projecting his uncomfortable and dormant feelings for Oswald--yes, he’s quite sure of that now--on Sofia when he met her. He never confronts his feelings, has never, except for in moments like this, dead or dying, too late to make a difference.

Is he hallucinating? Is any of this real? Jim doesn’t know if knowing that it isn’t would make him feel better--like he can still pretend to never examine what he feels for Oswald, to move on either in life or life after death--or worse, because if none of this is real, then any progress he’s made is fake, too, and all that will remain of him, somewhere, is a pile of ash if that, never discovered under the ruins of Jeremiah’s maze, and never anything more to Oswald than the man who betrayed his trust, the man who left him in Arkham.

As if reading his mind (and that’s probably a bad sign, right?), Oswald pulls Jim’s head down into another soft, lingering kiss. When he breaks it, he meets Jim’s grimace and holds it challengingly.

“You’re thinking way too loud. Stop it.”

Letting go of all the buzzing thoughts and concerns he carries, Jim closes his eyes, a smile playing on the corners of his lips. “Aren’t you supposed to be distracting me?”

At that, Oswald reconnects the space between them hastily, his lips curved into a smile as Jim learns them, learns them as he feels, somehow, he already has. This time, when Oswald’s hand blindly grasps for the buttons of his shirt, Jim lets him undo it (helps him enthusiastically), blindly and clumsily trying to give the same courtesy to the Penguin in turn. Skin presses to skin, shirts are shed, and they break apart again: hot and bothered, flustered, panting. 

Sliding back onto his place on Jim’s hips in a straddle, Oswald looks down, smug. Always so damn smug. It’s a good look on him, Jim thinks but can never, ever say, because whether or not he plans to pursue Oswald in any capacity, in any life (if it is even still a possibility to do so), Jim knows nothing good can come out of complimenting the man’s self satisfied hubris.

“Well, this has all been profoundly unsexy, Jim, but I think if we put our minds to it, we can turn it around. What do you say?”

In lieu of an answer, Jim smiles deviously, giving Oswald about half a second of warning before flipping them, positioning himself now on Oswald’s hips, looking down on his face, flustered and admiring all at once. He stays that way for a moment before dipping his head again to Oswald’s, fumbling in the meantime with the button on his pants.

At their contact, Jim feels Oswald’s hips jerk once, suddenly, and a moan presses against his mouth in the throes of the kiss. Encouraged and half hard, Jim makes short work of the pants as Oswald curses and pulls at his own, and finds himself then at the event horizon he’s been hurtling toward: naked in bed with Oswald Cobblepot.

More than anything, it just feels inevitable.

Like kissing him, it is nowhere near as alien a situation as it should be. Oswald responds to his hesitation, his quick pause in movement, by rolling his eyes and pulling Jim down to him in a huff of impatientness, and just like that, he’s moved past his quandary--but really, if the moment that finally damns him is that act of shedding the last of his clothes and not all those leading up to that final moment; not the act of waking up to a sexual fantasy when he’d been blown to bits only moments before, then God is more callous than Jim thought--and knows nothing but Oswald’s thigh against his cock and Oswald’s cock in his hand, Oswald’s hand in his hair, his back pressed to the bed with Jim’s weight pressing down on him.

He’s embarrassingly close already; just this simple, flushed  _ contact _ will probably be enough to get him off if Oswald doesn’t change something fast. Oswald is moving in such a way that every brush, every tease feels like ecstacy, feels good, feels  _ great, _ and once again, Jim has to wonder whether it’s real or just a figment of his imagination, a hallucination brought on by years of sexual frustration and tension and his dying mind’s last ditch effort to not end miserably, but even as Oswald arches into his grip, breathing hard, he pulls away.

“Come now, Jim, you want this to last, don’t you?”

The answer, if he is being honest, is a resounding  _ no, _ but Oswald is moving of his own volition, already set on a course of action, and with his legs tight around Jim’s sides, he manages to flip them off balance again. Jim finds himself looking up into his eyes, now, and okay, it’s hot, it’s  _ definitely _ hot, and with an embarrassing noise that is somewhere between a groan and a whine, Jim feels himself jerk up, desperate for the simple pleasure of friction against Oswald.

With a grip that is much stronger than what Jim expected of him, Oswald holds down Jim’s hips in turn.

“Patience. I do so want this to be good for you, Jim, and you’re going to be gone before it even starts.”

Something about the command gives Jim pause, but at least he regains control, keeps himself from rutting like a horny teenager with years of sexual frustration and very little experience (the thought that the description might describe his current situation very well being pushed from his mind as soon as it enters). While he lies back, letting Oswald move and tease and do whatever he wants, it clicks; all at once, he knows why the sentence struck a chord.

“Damn it,” he manages, words coming in increasingly short bursts between pangs of pleasure.

“Hmm?” Oswald seems only half-listening to what Jim is saying, focus much more concentrated on the physical for once in his life.

“Look, if you aren’t actually Penguin, could you at least--ah--do a better job of pretending?”

Now Oswald is turned toward him entirely, his movements momentarily frozen. Looking down over himself, and then at Jim, he wrinkles his brow. 

“I…  _ apologize _ if my presentation leaves something to be desired, but--”

“It’s not that. Just… can’t you think of yourself more? Oswald wouldn’t--ah, ah,  _ Oswald _ \--wouldn’t be so concentrated on making this so good for me.”

“Ouch. It hurts that you think so little of me, you know.”

“Please. You expect me to believe you think of yourself first in--in everything but sex? Give me a break.”

Oswald blinks, studying Jim. “Let me get this straight,” he says slowly, uncomprehending. “You want me to make this less good for you.”

He punctuates the question with a roll of his hips, eliciting a groan before Jim can bite it back.

_ “--Yes.” _

Amused, Oswald drops the loose hold he had on Jim’s cock. “Suit yourself.”

With that, he leans back, grabbing a vial in one hand off a bedside table that Jim is willing to testify hadn’t been there before he had stretched for it, holding the thing in one hand and uncorking it with his mouth while using the other hand to lazily stroke his own arousal. Embarrassingly, Jim flushes through at the sight, needy and hard and  _ wanting, _ and Oswald knows it, the bastard, his eyes drifting between Jim’s lap and his face.

“What’s wrong, detective? This is what you wanted, is it not?”

The damn tease.

After a few seconds of simple voyeurism, Oswald finally takes pity on him, leaning forward and tracing his hand down Jim’s chest, down, down--

Instead of resting again on his cock, though, Oswald keeps drifting, putting use to the lubricant (heavenly lubricant--imagine that) he’d grabbed while Jim has to use every ounce of his stamina and self control not to demand that he speed up, that he move, that Oswald would just  _ fuck _ him, dammit.

Like so many other things today, this is new, but not alien. Unexpected, but not bizarre. Jim has slept with men before, and everything leading up to this point he’d had a basis for--if this is new to him, well. He knows the general principle. 

He’s seen porn, at the very least.

Barely focused on what he’s doing, Oswald meets Jim’s eyes with a dark amusement.

“Were you a churchgoing child, James?”

Bringing his tongue back under his control, regathering the capacity for speech, is much more of a chore than it should be.

“Er--yes. For a while. Be _ fore-- _ Before my dad died. Oswald--”

“Wow, me too. Such strange similarities, hmm? Of course, I never had a father in my youth, so I continued to attend my mother’s church until fairly recently. You might not believe it, Jim, but I was actually quite the religious sort.”

Torn between a mild curiosity toward where Oswald is going with this and his desperate and growing desire, Jim makes a sort of humming/groaning noise in affirmation, elbows hardly supporting him where he props himself up on the bed.

“I guess it doesn’t mean anything in the end. Church three times a week and you can still end up like me.”

“We _ \--ah-- _ are what we are, Os.” Here they are, meeting under something inimitable, doing something base and spiritual, and all that Jim can think of, can hold in his mind is that memory--outside Nygma’s apartment (and what a strange apex for the collision of everything), Oswald’s hand in Lee’s as he wished them luck, not pulling back or entreating Jim to stay, not like Lee, who had begged him to go.

Well, they’d all seen how that turned out.

“How right you are! You know, I’ve made my peace with it. I know where I’ll go when I die, and it won’t be anywhere as nice as all this.” The tone Oswald says this with is conversational, casual, taking damnation in stride as easily as he adapts to everything else. Jim is nearly impressed with his nonchalance, and would be, if he didn’t recognize the attitude as feigned, as a strong bluff, but a bluff nonetheless. “Impatience was always my downfall--I wouldn’t settle for happiness after I was dead and gone, obviously.”

Jim is out of it, nodding along, hardly comprehending.

“But if I had known then, Jim, that it’d be like this? I never even imagined.”

“The sex--hah--the sex is that good?”

“An eternity with Jim Gordon,” Oswald continues as if he didn’t hear. “For that, I could find religion.”

A few things happen at once. Oswald uses the end of the sentence as his occasion to replace his hand with his dick, going altogether faster than Jim had been expecting (Oswald having taken the plea to give him some semblance of realism entirely to heart), and hard enough to make Jim moan--in the same moment, he finds himself pulling Oswald’s mouth to his, because he  _ knows, _ in that moment, knows a few things. First: the light he’d been struggling to place, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once: that isn’t around Oswald, or behind him. It  _ is _ Oswald, Oswald alone, lighting the void and glowing and shining and downright radiant. Second--

Jim is goddamn in love with Oswald Cobblepot.

Maybe it’s this, or maybe it’s the years of tension, or maybe it has something to do with dying and getting his cosmic reward for having his atoms disintegrated by Jeremiah Valeska, but getting fucked by the Penguin will forever rank in Jim’s top three best experiences of all time, and the other two aren’t even  _ close.  _ His mouth is bitten and kissed and thoroughly owned, and he falls back, losing himself to the pleasure of being broken apart, demolished, used,  _ fucked. _ As Oswald’s breath quickens, he finds one hand reclaiming its grasp on Jim’s cock, working with a hard grip, and when Oswald finally breaks off into a messy bliss, Jim knows he won’t last much longer at all.

For a second, he’s lucid enough to hear a final whispered assurance from Oswald (“see you soon”), and then he’s simply gone, gone, gone, his world consumed by supernova, by a singularity: dazzling and brilliant and so good it hurts. 

After that, everything goes white.

 

When Jim Gordon cheats death, it goes like this: he comes to gasping, feeling the ghost of Oswald’s legs tangled with his own, skin tingling with touches, with kisses, with lingering contact. Sweet, sweet contact--Jim has never known anything to feel as good. For a moment, his world is bright light and wracking pleasure, and then it all crashes down around him, and in an instant, he understands intimately the moment when a firecracker turns firework, feeling not so much like the demolition project as the stick of dynamite, detonated in a burst and somehow roughly patched back together again.

He should not be alive.

It is several minutes before Jim can haltingly pry open his eyes, can manage to use his voice for so much as a groan. When the world comes back into focus, he does not find himself looking at an impossible, inconceivable space of shifting colors and shapes and dimensions that are far beyond him, but a very earthly room--a worn out laboratory smelling faintly of last week’s coffee and tomorrow’s antiseptic. He thinks for a moment that he is alone, and despairs in it, and then hears a polite cough--to his right is Ed Nygma, looking perturbed. 

This revelation that he is not alone is not half as much of a comfort as he had originally anticipated.

“What has two lives, an unwilling ally, a helpful enemy, and, hm… 23% area surface burns?”

“Ed--” Jim’s voice croaks, not from disuse so much as dehydration, from the raw pain of living.

It’s good to be back.

Impatient for an answer, Ed crosses his legs. “You. That wasn’t even a true riddle; I’m disappointed in both of us. Though, I suppose I should cut you some slack--after all, you have been dead for 13 hours.”

“What?”

“Legally. When the bomb went off, you were out of the worst of the blast zone, but if it weren’t for the swift action of my trusty field agent, you’d be barbeque.” Ed considers his words for a second and grins. “Yum.”

Grimacing, Jim tries to pull himself into a sitting position, falls back on the table he woke up on (and oh, Jim despairs for that etheric bed with its soft cushions now), and then tries again. Staying down feels too much like displaying a weakness, and he hasn’t gotten out of the lion’s den yet. Not if he’s in the Narrows, flanked only by Ed Nygma.

“Why did you have an agent tailing me,” Jim asks, attempting to keep the question neutral. If Nygma isn’t openly acting as an aggressor, the last thing he needs right now is to make him one, but his senses are screaming, and he knows altogether very little about the situation he’s woken up in.

“Oh, Jim. So oblivious.”

Jim grits his teeth, growling. “Get to the point.”

“You’re no fun. Look, I was going to the GCPD to break Lee out--don’t give me that look, you didn’t want to send her to Blackgate, either--and I had to ensure nothing happened to you in the chaos so that Lee couldn’t blame me for your death. When you decided to go off after Jeremiah Valeska--which was a  _ fascinatingly _ bad plan, by the way--”

“Ed.”

_ “Riddler. _ When you went off on your suicide mission, my agent was still following you, and so here we are.”

“Your agent cured my third degree burns?”

“What? No. God, no. They collected the pieces. Rather a lot to ask from an unpaid grunt, actually--you should thank them.”

“Later. So then--”

“Be  _ patient. _ Your burns were extensive, your body was in bits, and you were categorically dead. Again,  _ I _ had no problem with you remaining in such a state indefinitely, but it would upset Lee, so… I had you brought back here.” Ed looks at him expectantly, then rolls his eyes when Jim fails to react. “You’re welcome.”

It doesn’t add up. Maybe it’s the lingering after effects of being raised from the dead, but it just makes no fucking sense. 

“I don’t understand how--”

“You’re still alive to meddle another day? Leslie Thompkins.” A look of dreamy admiration that makes him look four years younger crosses Ed’s face, a relic of his time at the GCPD--Jim definitely hasn’t seen him so infatuated since Kristen Kringle. “You really never appreciated what you had, Jim. She is a  _ goddess.” _

“As well as a crime boss, a bank robber, and a miracle worker, apparently. Where is she?”

Ed shoots him a cold look. “She’s sleeping. Nearly 10 hours spent hustling over you to ensure you didn’t try to die on her again, don’t you think she deserves some rest?”

“But I was dead. It doesn’t add up--how did she…?”

“Have you heard of Lazarus water, detective?”

Jim’s mind darts involuntarily back to Oswald, or at least his hallucination of him.  _ ‘Were you a churchgoing child, James?’ _ Jim had been telling the truth when he had affirmed that he was--the name Lazarus meant something to him, now on a deeply personal level. More than that, though, he knows where he has heard it before.

“Ivy Pepper stole Lazarus water from Wayne enterprises. Are you saying that you brought her into all of this?” That’s just what he needs, another factor in this giant, twisting web of horrors that he finds himself tangled in. Killed by Jeremiah Valeska, comforted by the Penguin, revived by Ivy and the Riddler-- _ just  _ what he fucking needs.

“No.  _ No. _ As always, you are thinking on far too small a scale, Jim. Lazarus water has a unique property that helped miss Pepper’s plants to grow, yes, but more than that, it has tremendous life giving properties. Lee procured a sample of it from sources  _ who shall remain nameless, _ and used it along with some impromptu skin grafts and god knows what else to restore you to your pathetic life. Is that a good enough explanation for you, detective, or are you going to continue grilling me? It’s  _ quite _ tiresome.”

It isn’t, and he’d like to, but Jim figures that even if he does, he won’t get anything useful out of Ed at this point, anyway. Instead, he grits his teeth and pushes himself off of the table, landing unsteadily on the floor, where he takes a few cautious steps and begins putting on the clothes Lee must have left out for him--sizes too big, and almost definitely hand-me-downs from some inhabitant of the Narrows who didn’t believe in body spray the way Jim does, but clothes nonetheless. Jim tries to remind himself that he should be thankful.

“That’s enough, Ed. Look, thanks, I guess. I owe you.”

Ed smiles, smugly. “So it would seem.”

“Tell Lee thanks from me, too.” Jim hesitates. “I probably don’t deserve her help after all I’ve done to her.”

“Well. I’m glad we agree on one thing.” Watching Jim take a few more (increasingly unsteady) steps toward the door, he gets up. “Surely you aren’t trying to leave in your condition, Jim.”

“Jeremiah Valeska is tearing apart the city,” he grunts.

“And you think you can stop him? Please. You won’t make it out the door.”

Jim scans the room and spots what he’s looking for--a crutch, made out of wood for someone a considerable amount shorter than Jim, but still a crutch--resting in the corner. “Wanna help me out, Ed, or are you going to get out of my way?”

Plainly irritated, Ed grabs the device and shoves it brusquely at Jim, making to exit the room as he does. “About that favor. Drop the charges against Lee and me, or the next time you find yourself in a life or death situation, my people’s orders won’t be to  _ help _ you.”

He disappears out the door before Jim can reply, leaving him alone. 

It’s bizarre, all of it. The puzzle pieces--Jeremiah, Ed, Lee, the Lazarus water--don’t quite fit, none lining up as they should, but ultimately, it can wait. He has to get the information he obtained to the GCPD, to Harvey… and then there’s someone he needs to see.

Leaning heavily on his crutch, Jim limps out of Lee’s office, down onto the street, and hails a cab downtown. 

For once, he’s going to set things right.

 

When Jim Gordon opens up a new chapter in the life he nearly lost, it starts like this: a tired man with bandages on his arms and face gets out of a cab, leaning heavily on a wooden crutch not designed for him. He limps to the door of a mansion he’d once had cause to enter for very different (yet startlingly similar) reasons, and knocks on it, though his dwindling strength protests the action feverently. In his eyes is the dull pain of knowing that Lazarus water or no, it will be quite a long time before he regains his full strength, if he ever does, but also the spark of his fighting spirit, the vibrant life preserved, like Gotham city itself, to fight another day.

Jim’s mouth is a leaking dam, only just holding back the babble of words that push to escape. When the door opens, that’s nearly all the catalyst he needs to finally stand aside and let it break, to start spilling, hardly lucid, every single revelation and embarrassing thought that he’d been holding in at the precinct while he’d warned and then congratulated Harvey, aware that his duty had to, _ had to _ come first, but preoccupied every second with thoughts of his dream and of Oswald. When he looks up to the face of the man who answered the door, though, it is not the Penguin or one of his faceless manservants, but rather the undead corpse of Butch Gilzean. 

That’s enough to stop the flood. Jim isn’t sure whether or not he’s thankful for it.

“Well, well. Detective Gordon.”

“Butch,” Jim replies warily. Being in with the mob and quite frequently changing his alliances, Butch has always been somewhat of a wild card, but ever since he went through his dramatic transformation courtesy Barbara Kean, the few things Jim has gleaned from second hand reports have become more and more unstable, and surviving a bomb just to be strangled to death isn’t Jim’s ideal end to the day.

“Heard you were dead, Jim.”

“Well,” Jim fixes a hard look on his face, hoping that it’ll compensate for the fact that he’d lost his gun to Jeremiah’s labyrinth bomb and is therefore armed only with the crutch he finds himself relying all too heavily on. “Could have said the same about you.”

Butch sneers. “Yeah. But they brought you back nicer,” he says resentfully.

Feeling the tension near its breaking point, yet lacking the energy or the inclination to defuse the situation, Jim flushes with relief when he finally hears the uneven footsteps of the man he’d actually come here to see.

“Butch,” Oswald’s voice whines, exasperated. “Who is it? Did you send them aw--oh.” Standing in the doorway, Oswald freezes, gaping. “Jim. Well.”

Face tingeing a bit, the Penguin manages to turn away from Jim’s seemingly miraculous appearance for long enough to usher Gilzean back to whichever coffin he’d crawled out of.

“Thank you, Butch, I’ll take it from here.” When his pleasantry isn’t heeded, Oswald adds a hiss: “You can go now.”

“Wait a damn minute, Cobblepot.” Butch grabs Oswald by the front of his suit, hauling him up in a way that Penguin seems overly familiar with. “We have a deal. This,” he jerks his thumb at Jim “doesn’t change that.”

Resentment in his voice, Oswald chokes. “Of course not. I’ll rejoin you and the Sirens in a matter of minutes to discuss--I simply cannot leave my  _ guest  _ waiting, as he could contain valuable intel, which may prove beneficial to us. Now  _ go.”  _

With a huff, Butch turns and follows his instructions, plodding back down the hall with heavier footfalls than are probably strictly necessary.

“So rude, I apologize,” Oswald grimaces as he fixes his tie back into place haughtily. “Anyhow--Jim Gordon. I see that you’ve conquered death against the odds.”

There is an odd, inscrutable look in his eye as he says this, a challenge of sorts, or perhaps a distant, weary hope. Jim smiles begrudgingly.

“Turns out I’m just as hard to kill as you are.”

“Don’t push your luck, James.” Despite himself, Oswald returns the smile, oddly bashful for a man as confident and brash as Oswald has always been with everyone but Jim. He opens his mouth as if to say something compromising, but before he can surrender to his emotions, Oswald’s eyes snap to the street, and he puts a tight grip around Jim’s bicep.

“Come in off the street before anyone sees you. Right now, everyone still thinks you’re dead, and it would be quite a boon to have it stay that way, no?”

Practicality wins out over matters of the heart, and in a way, Jim is grateful for it. Being too forward, too vulnerable, had never been either of their strong suits--his recent experience excluded, any deviation would just seem bizarre.

Jim allows himself to be pulled into the mansion, his breathing more difficult than he would like to admit. Oswald gives him a look that says he recognizes the pain, but it isn’t one of pity (Jim could not have borne that), but rather of a quiet solidarity. 

“Sit.” It isn’t a question. “I’ll clear things with your… delightful ex, and procur refreshments. Then we can talk.”

“Oswald--”

“Please, no arguments. I do so strive to be an excellent host, after all. Wait here.”

It’s harder to argue with the man than he usually finds it, at least in this particular context. In regards to petty arguments with Oswald, though he’s sure that there will be plenty in the future, in the present, the fight just seems to leave him. He watches Oswald limp quickly down the same hallway Butch had retreated through.

Alone in the den now, Jim finds himself reflecting on the past 24 hours, awaiting Oswald’s return. He’s been through similar amounts of danger, has been shot innumerable times and come out fighting, but even so, Jim knows that this day is unique--never before has he been so thoroughly affected by an event, even one as apocalyptic as the Tetch virus, nor so intrinsically changed. Jim spends a few minutes trying to figure out where he fits into his own life now, what he’ll have to change to accomodate the lasting effects, physical and mental, of dying and coming back, but after struggling with the question for a long moment, he drops it. He’ll fit himself in where he fits in. Worrying about it now will do him no good.

Thus preoccupied, it feels like almost no time at all before the door clicks open again, the Penguin reentering with a tray laden with water, tea, sliced apples, and soft cheeses, prepared so fast that Jim wonders if he truly is as excellent a host as he branded himself or if, somehow, he’d been expecting company.

Whatever. Jim is starving, and the fact that the cheese he’s most intimately familiar with comes from a gas station, melted on a hotdog, does nothing to stop him from leaving Oswald in suspense for several moments as he picks at the selection. 

“Well,” Oswald prompts. “I assume you come here with reason?”

Could he know? Jim doesn’t waste time trying to puzzle through it--there’s too much he doesn’t, can’t understand yet, and it’s becoming easier to accept that. Trying to do anything else would only succeed in driving him absolutely insane.

“Yes.” Jim swallows the gulp of water he’d managed to force down his throat. “Oswald, I’m in love with you.”

Coughing around the sip of tea he’d just taken himself, Oswald turns to him incredulously.

“You-- _ what? _ ”

“When I was, uh, dead. I thought I--well, I must have dreamed--I saw you. And then I knew.”

“Surely you know you’re being a bit hasty, Jim?”

“No. Look, I don’t expect anything from you, Oswald, it’s just--it’s you. I think I’ve known it for a long time.”

Oswald laughs uncertainly, a troubled look coming over his eyes. “I hardly see how a near death experience threw you so far out of your loop, old friend, but I do entreat you to think about what you’re saying before you let something out that you’ll regret--”

“Look, Oswald. I died. I saw you. Don’t you think that means something?”

“Jim, I think it means you’re unwell.”

“I am, damn it! That doesn’t change the fact that this  _ means _ something, Oswald. You and I have been circling each other for years, don’t you think that means something? That it--that we--happened for a reason? You understand me more than anyone else in Gotham. When I woke up, I realized that I needed you.”

Oswald darts his eyes to his and away, at war with himself. “Jim…”

Restraint wins out for a solid moment before Oswald pitches forward, catching himself with his arms around Jim’s neck and his legs straddling Jim in a way that has become familiar, though clumsier in real life than in dreamscape. Without thinking, Jim fits a hand at the back of Oswald’s neck, grip intimate as he pulls the Penguin’s head down and fits their mouths together. When they merge, it does not feel like the first time.

The kiss is, for him, new and familiar, practiced and alien. It speaks of Oswald’s tea and whispered nothings, of eternity, of death. Breathing hard, Jim has to pull away to catch himself, to recover, because deep inside, a part of him still feels detached, like a dead weight he’s going to have to drag around for the rest of his life, and it’s pulling him away from the room, draining his stamina. It’s infuriatingly limiting, but it’s just something that Jim is going to have to get used to.

Oswald rests their foreheads together and speaks, his eyes closed.

“I admit to having imagined this moment before, Jim.”

“Yeah?” Jim breathes in turn. “How does this compare?” 

“It’s… different, definitely.” Jim knows as he hears it that the burns and the timing and his injured state must be the disparity, the gap between the perfect fantasy and the disappointing reality. Part of him screams to apologize, and if he had even an ounce less self respect, he probably would. Oswald simply smiles, burying his face in Jim’s neck. “It’s so much better than I’d anticipated.”

Pure, concentrated affection wells up in Jim, and wildly, he captures Oswald’s mouth again with his own, exhaustion be damned. His heart is still racing, breathing still hard, but he’s tired, tired of waiting, tired of living, and if kissing Oswald again is going to kill him, well, he’s found that death isn’t so bad, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know what it is about gobblepot that made me want to get weird and theological, but getting weird and theological is practically my brand at this point, so i hope you enjoyed. hallucination?wald in this fic is highly inspired by various hallucination 'walds in the show--obviously jim's, from the tetch debacle, but with a hint of ed's sexual panic, though with less latent homophobia and more latent repressed bisexuality. 
> 
> i decided to keep my initial ed & jim encounter even after the real events paralleling what i wrote jossed it because i find the two of them uncomfortably trying to ally themselves with one another more interesting than Jim And Ed Have A Dick Measuring Contest Over Lee ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯. 
> 
> overall, i found this a very fun concept to play with, so i hope you enjoyed!


End file.
